Selber organisiert

Abstract

"[M]edia, cultural and globalization studies have essentially ignored questions of language and translation" acknowledges Demont-Heinrich (2011, 402), himself a professor of journalism studies. Even in publications dedicated to multilingualism in the media, issues of translation are relegated to the margins. News translation is a troublemaker within translation studies as well, where it questions classical definitions of translation by shaking fundamental concepts like authorship or source-text. New case studies are now crucial to establish whether these results also apply to convergent newsrooms, which pose technological and human challenges to journalists of the 21st century through multiple-platform publishing and convergence of the roles or media producers and consumers. In a convergent newsroom such as the Ottawa Citizen of Le Droit (two Canadian newspapers and websites), translation is not as overtly present as it is in television newsrooms through subtitles, in news agencies, in multilingual NGOs and in multicultural radio newsrooms. This research project therefore asks heuristic questions: are there observable translation practices in a Canadian convergent newsroom that is producing monolingual information? Translation probably happens when the journalists want to access sources in different languages, but how? Is translation kept invisible in a bilingual country such as Canada as it is in Switzerland or in global newsrooms? Or do journalists have less commonsensical conceptions of translation? The aim of this project is to investigate the meanings journalists attach to translation in a convergent newsroom in Canada, to observe and spread good practices. As scholars in translation studies, media linguistics and journalism studies suggest, workplace ethnography can give insights into text production, meaning-making and emergent phenomena such as convergence. In terms of methods, I envisage to triangulate data: semi-structured interviews, several weeks of field observation and documents collected in the newsroom. This data is to be coded in vivo and analysed with interpretive methods. This project also opens up new avenues for methodological recommendations in the field of news translation. Given the ethnographic anchorage of the project, its conclusions could be directly transferable to continuing education for journalists or translation teaching. In terms of media literacy, this project could develop scholarly and public consciousness of the ubiquity and the role of translation in the information age.